| 12:01 |
: How you doing?
|
| 12:01 |
: We need to talk … about how they screwed up your team’s retro-park
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| 12:02 |
: More HR this year. Judge or Bautista?
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| 12:02 |
: Man, it’s looking like Judge and it won’t be close
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| 12:03 |
: Bautista might be wrong about his ability to beat aging models … It’s early, but that K% is troubling
|
On several occasions in my youth, in the early 1990s, my dad took me to the chain-link perimeter of the construction site of what was then called the Gateway Project. There, we monitored the progress of what was to become Progressive Field. Within what had been a warehouse and market district in downtown Cleveland, we saw a steel skeleton rise and concrete poured. And on April 2, 1994, it was awe-inspiring as a 14-year-old to walk into the new park for its first game, an exhibition-game christening against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Progressive Field was the second of the retro-style ballparks to open, following Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The ballpark, originally named Jacobs Field, hosted its first regular-season game on April 4, 1994. The Ballpark in Arlington became the third retro park to open, a week later, on April 11, 1994.
Upon entering the stadium that day some 23 years ago, it was clear that the overall experience would be markedly superior to that of the multi-purpose Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Jacobs Field had charm, including varying wall heights, asymmetrical dimensions, and a backdrop of downtown high rises. It also had modern amenities, wider concourses, and no obstructed views.
As soon as Camden Yards opened, most existing stadiums became immediately obsolete. Since 1992, 21 teams have opened new stadiums. One club, the Atlanta Braves, is now on their second — SunTrust Park, which opened last week. (Let the record show that Bartolo Colon’s major-league career outlasted Turner Field.)
This is not a post about the morality or utility of many of these parks having been funded, at least in part, by tax dollars. That’s a subject for another post, another day. This post is about design and location. There’s no doubt SunTrust will offer a more enjoyable experience than that of Turner Field, which had little character, was planted in a sub-optimal location, and was essentially a leftover of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. But, like nearly every new ballpark that has been constructed, SunTrust is, to me, flawed in significant ways.
One of the perks of a beat writer, in which capacity I served for four years while covering the Pirates for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, is travel. As a beat writer, you’re able to see much of the country and many of its major-league parks. I haven’t visited every major-league park, but I’ve been to the majority. And nearly every new park shares the same design issues. First, too many seats are too far removed from the playing surface. Second, too many parks aren’t situated where they should be — and that is, preferably, not just in a city but in a neighborhood. (From a total experience before, during, and after games, Wrigley Field stands alone in the National League.)
This is a guest post from Jen Mac Ramos, assistant general manager of the Sonoma Stompers. You can find Jen on Twitter.
The MLB Urban Youth Academy in Compton, California, is tucked away in a small corner of the Compton campus of El Camino Community College. Early on a Friday, the field is being prepared for a day-and-a-half’s worth of baseball games and instruction. As the buses roll up to the field, out pour about 100 young girls under the age of 16 and their coaches, many of whom are members of Team USA’s women’s national baseball team. Their excitement mounts as they view for the first time their home for the next two days, where their love for the game will be on full display
This is the Trailblazer Series, the first-of-its-kind girls baseball tournament in the United States, showcasing young female ballplayers from the States, D.C., and Canada. Featuring guest speakers such as Kim Ng, the senior vice president of baseball operations for Major League Baseball and the highest ranking Asian-American woman baseball executive, the tournament is meant to inspire young girls to pursue their dreams of playing baseball and give them the confidence to achieve other goals.
I drove down from Northern California’s Wine Country as the Sonoma Stompers’ representative at the tournament. The Stompers have made waves before, having added the first professional openly gay baseball player, Sean Conroy, to its roster in 2015 and three women — Anna Kimbrell, Stacy Piagno, and Kelsie Whitmore — to the team in 2016. (Kimbrell and Piagno, the latter of whom will be returning to the Stompers in 2017, also served as coaches at the Trailblazer Series.)
Episode 733
Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and the author of an eponymous Baseball Newsletter. He’s also (a) FanGraphs’ writer-in-residence for the month of April and (b) the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 56 min play time.)
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Note: this week’s edition of Best Of has been published on Sunday instead of Saturday because (a) Paul Swydan is away and (b) he asked an irresponsible colleague to take his place.
Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
MONDAY
Eric Thames Is Still Mashing by Nick Stellini
What was true when Stellini published this on Monday remains true today.
Starting Pitcher Pitch Mix Changes by Mike Podhorzer
Danny Salazar’s throwing more changeups, Kendall Graveman more fastballs. Podhorzer’s on the case.
Chase Whitley grew up playing good old country hardball in Alabama. More specifically, he played it in rural Alabama. The Tampa Bay Rays right-hander hails from Ranburne, which he affectionately described as “a small town with zero stoplights.” Fewer than 500 people call it home, so it’s no wonder he knows “literally every person there.”
In Hoosiers-like fashion, the close-knit community has captured sports glory.
“Growing up, my teams consisted of a bunch of close friends,” related Whitley. “There were 13 of us, and we played together from Little League and Dixie Youth all the way through high school. My junior year, we won the state championship.”
Whitley also played on some “really good” basketball teams, and he spent time on the gridiron as well. Kids in Ranburne are expected to participate in multiple sports because, well, it’s what you do in that neck of the woods. As for their athletic accomplishments, Whitley views them mostly as a byproduct of “buddies who hang out and play some pretty good ball.”
That’s when they’re not working. Growing up where they did, you earn your keep. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Ichiro’s home run in his return to Seattle, the feasibility of intentionally allowing dingers, a John Jaso quote, and manager bobbleheads, then discuss the present and future use, abuse, and presentation of Statcast data.
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It’s not a shock that Madison Bumgarner has never been on the disabled list before now. He’s a big horse of a man, made purely of muscle and tree sap. The only thing that’s prevented him from being sidelined is Bruce Bochy not letting him throw 400 innings in a year and, apparently, that he’s been steady on a dirt bike until now.
Bumgarner is on the DL after a dirt bike accident. He has bruised ribs and a Grade One or Two Strain of his shoulder AC joint. #SFGiants
— Henry Schulman BLUE CHECK MARK (@hankschulman) April 21, 2017
A tough thing about analyzing pitching is that it’s a moving target. You can get a decent sense of what a pitcher is like right now, and then he can completely change his approach over the next month and become a different pitcher. There’s evidence of this in the data: a pitcher’s exit velocity becomes stable relatively quickly, but then that stat’s predictability doesn’t actually improve as the sample increases. In other words, you can see what the pitcher’s got now, but what about tomorrow? Ask us then.
This is all relevant to Tyler Chatwood. You might have thought you had an idea of who he was as a pitcher — great sinker, uses his four-seamer for whiffs, and doesn’t have great secondary stuff, so it’s all about the ground balls. That’s who he was! It isn’t who he is right now, though. I had to ask him about who he is right now when I had the chance.
Eric Hosmer is a free agent after this season. Maybe the most interesting free agent of the upcoming winter. If you are an unnamed scout who talked to Jon Heyman back in spring training, you think Hosmer should get far more than the 5 years/$73 million Brandon Belt got as an extension from the Giants, because anyone who thinks Belt is better than Hosmer should “get a grip”. The old $200 million rumor is so ridiculous we don’t even need to bother addressing it, but as Jeff wrote in February, it wouldn’t be that hard for a team to rationalize their way into a deal for more than $100 million if they believed a few things that aren’t entirely unbelievable.
But, as a counterpoint to Jeff’s perfectly reasonable post, I’d like to present a leaderboard that offers another perfectly reasonable position; the one that just acknowledges that Eric Hosmer isn’t very good.